Twitter Fingers Headed for the White House

About 19 minutes after Chuck Jones, head of the steelworkers union at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, went on CNN to correct Donald Trump’s inflated count of the jobs he’d saved there, the president-elect unleashed the hounds on Twitter. Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump transition official appearing on the same program, had barely finished saying, “What I admire about Mr. Jones, he’s fighting for the American worker,” when Mr. Trump tweeted, “Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers.”

Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!

Mr. Jones’s friends called him to warn that trolls were threatening him. “I take it with a grain of salt,” the 30-year union veteran said. “I can deal with people that make stupid statements, and move on.”

Donald Trump loves “my beautiful Twitter account,” as he calls it. It seems nothing — not his critics, not his advisers, not a Melania Trump anti-cyberbullying crusade — will get him off his Android. The First Amendment defends the right of everyone to tweet for attention, including our volcanic president-elect (and his paranoid national security adviser). While it’s hard to ignore anything an incoming leader of the free world says, maybe Mr. Jones’s shrugging response carries a lesson. Mr. Trump has 17 million Twitter followers, not 320 million. So when the tweeter in chief goes racing off like Road Runner, does everyone have to chase him and go over a cliff?

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Donald Trump using his phone in his office in Trump Tower last year.CreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

That’s what happened after Mr. Trump, tweeting on Tuesday, threatened to “cancel” what he said was a $4 billion order for a new Air Force One from Boeing. Boeing’s shares fell, the company issued a statement and it scrambled to get on the phone with Mr. Trump and others. The Pentagon, Air Force and White House all made statements. The congressional delegation from Washington State, where Boeing has a big presence, put out a news release saying the project “will support good-paying jobs throughout Northwest Washington.” Reporters converged on a plant to gauge worker morale.

By that time Mr. Trump and his phone had moved on. Was Mr. Trump trolling Boeing because he was annoyed at its chief executive? Was he holding federal government contractors to account? Or did he make money on Boeing’s stock slump? Nobody knows. On Tuesday, his spokesman said Mr. Trump sold his stock in Boeing last summer, but offered no proof.

Mr. Trump has tweeted more than two dozen times so far this week, mostly about his own press coverage and public appearances. He didn’t tweet about the worsening carnage in Syria, the 36 people killed in the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, Calif., news that the Pentagon tried to bury an internal report documenting $125 billion in wasteful spending, or even most of his own cabinet appointments.

One wishes Mr. Trump would take the advice he tweeted to Mr. Jones: “Spend more time working — less time talking.” Maybe once he becomes president he’ll be so consumed with pressing duties that he won’t have time to tweet. But you know that won’t happen. It will be up to the rest of us to develop Mr. Jones’s unruffled sense of perspective, and separate the meaningful tweet from the chaff.